A Study Will Use Dogs to Diagnose Colon Cancer

A team of researchers in England just got the green light for a new study, to see if dogs can use their sense of smell to help diagnose COLON cancer.

The researchers are collecting hundreds of stool samples, and want to see how good the dogs are at identifying the ones that come from colon cancer patients.

They’re also going to do it with urine samples. The goal is to figure out if dogs can help catch colon cancer earlier, so more people survive it. Plus it would be cheaper than other tests, and less invasive.

This isn’t actually the first time someone’s tried this. In 2011, an eight-year-old Labrador correctly identified colon cancer 97% of the time. But that was with one dog, and only a few dozen samples.

This time they’re doing it on a much larger scale, and plan to collect about 2,000 samples for dogs to analyze.